Yet I never gave up and continued to speak to her through my innocent letters.
1968
Dear Mom and Dad,
I once stated in a poem I wrote, “Love is the key to serenity.” I have changed my viewpoint completely. Although love has a great role to play in the human race I feel love is not the true key to serenity. I feel it is the knowledge of one’s self. To know yourself as you know a song. With true understanding, meaning, fearlessness and the ability to compensate for those losses which meant a great deal to one’s self…. I’m not sure if that meant anything to you or even if you understood what I just wrote, but I think if you think about it, it will bring a new light to your eyes.
Was I rebelling for the mother who was entangled in her own web and growing visibly exhausted from the years of deceit and sorrow?
Now, when I intruded on Mama alone, I interrogated her. What was she doing? I ridiculed her for asking my piano teacher to dinner. I found him ugly and stupid, and I hated him, but she brightened perceptibly when they talked about music. I resented her making treats, even sandwiches, for the graduate students who spent so many hours doing research in the library where she worked because it seemed that she was searching for camaraderie through students hardly older than I. She made friends with them and knew each one by name. I sensed that they were taking Tommy’s place. I felt jealous. Why couldn’t I be the one?
On the few occasions I had to steal money from her purse, I would first unpack her satchel. She always had a book buried inside, The Brothers Karamazov, The Plague, The Feminine Mystique, and often Waiting for Godot. While Mama seemed to be searching for meaning and answers through strangers and books with strange names, I was busily trying to attract her—or anyone’s—attention with dangerous acts of defiance. Some of my signals of distress fell into my parents’ hands. Perhaps they nabbed my letters from the post box at our front door.
I was grounded for three months one summer after they intercepted the following letter:
JUNE 12, 1969
Dear Eddy,
Well … for the past month I have been on drugs constantly and they are heavy drugs—not weed. Last Friday night I took some mescaline, I went to a coffee house off Telegraph Ave. It really started to hit me hard and when I left at 11:00 P.M. I was totaled. The next morning I went downstairs. I was still really messed-up (I hadn’t slept for 36 hours). My dad told me he knew about everything …
Life in the mansion in the hills came to a halt. My parents were constantly upset with me, I knew from their puffy eyes and closed-door meetings that I was being discussed and argued about. They were both at their wits’ end and afraid. So was I.
Private school in eighth grade hadn’t worked. Spending tenth grade in Davis, California, with the family of Larry’s wife, Carolyn Moore Layton, hadn’t worked either. Carolyn had married my brother, Larry, after their junior year at the University of California at Davis. Larry’s parents-in-law and my tenth-grade guardians, were kind, good people. I had had a tough year in ninth grade when my parents decided that Berkeley was too unstable an environment for me. Carolyn suggested I come live with her parents in Davis and attend high school there. My parents could not have found a finer family to help with the raising of their wayward daughter. Dr. John Moore was the Methodist minister for the college community. Barbara, his doting, handsome wife, was a perfect mother and an enthusiastic participant in their congregation’s activities. The Moore’s had three daughters: Carolyn, Rebecca, and Annie.
I’d grown very fond of Carolyn’s little sister, Sweet Annie, for her goodness and companionship. Annie was a year younger than I and quite different. She was quiet, studious, and loved school. We were intrigued by each other; I by her soft academic manner, and she by my rebelliousness. At night, while she studied in her room, I was writing dramatically desperate letters to the friends from whom my parents had separated me.
Annie wasn’t interested in boys, nor was she self-conscious about her tall, willowy body. She was more of a hippie than I. She wore long, floating tie-dyed skirts and white T-shirts, while I tugged on my tight black pegged pants each morning. Annie had the most beautiful long, thick, straight blond hair I had ever seen in my life. She had and was everything I wasn’t.
Every night while Annie brushed her hair, I stood next to her in the bathroom, looking into the same mirror, slopping on Dippity-Doo, a “guaranteed hair straightener.” While she pulled her brush down and through her voluminous mane, I doused mine with the gooey gel, wrapped the congealed strands of hair around my head, placed a bobby pin every inch or so to secure the potpourri, then tied a bandanna around my forehead to hold everything in place for the night.
After Annie was done preening and I engineering, we would conspiratorially dash into my room and dim the lights. Annie would light her favorite incense to create the right ambiance while I lowered the sound of some heartbreaking song drifting out from the record player and began reciting the latest rendition of my mostly somber poetry. The next morning, I would head straight for my English teacher’s office and show her the pieces Sweet Annie had oohed and oohed over the loudest.
But even with Annie’s friendship, I was still unable to stay out of trouble. In the middle of my tenth-grade school year in Davis, I dropped acid in class. Days later it was decided I should come back home to Berkeley, to a new school with different kids.
The only times I was successfully brought into line were on the long walks Papa would take with me. We’d usually stop at Indian Rock in the evenings, climb up and watch the sunset. From on top of the world, Papa would tell me how I was killing him and ruining his marriage. I was always deeply troubled by how much I was hurting him with my bad behavior and I was actually relieved when for the first and only time, Papa hit me with a belt because I’d shrugged and rolled my eyes when he asked me how I had managed to get an F in PE. Afterward I saw him crying and I was glad that someone had finally shown such outward emotion and anger at my recklessness.
But nothing lasted long enough. I was always able to deceive and snivel my way out of each punishment. By 1969, there remained two options for me: reform school or boarding school for eleventh grade. Mama’s mother had gone to school in England once … Why not me?
I do not remember being afraid of leaving, although the prospect of abandoning all my friends and going to boarding school overseas was a little daunting. I was relieved to be sent away, as relieved as my parents were to have me gone. I was tired of drinking a fifth of vodka to impress my friends—they weren’t the ones who got sick. I had been truly frightened when I had dropped acid and started to hallucinate an hour later in my English class. I needed strict limits, rules that were impossible to sneak around. I always brought a sliver of rebellion and cunning into any equation. The prospect of being taken from my hopelessness to a place where I could flourish excited me. At last, I was about to become a good person. And I was glad.
Mama had researched various boarding schools. She spoke with Friends at the Meeting House in Berkeley and brought home a large book with descriptions and photographs of possible schools. Mom called a family whose child had attended a Quaker school in Yorkshire, England, and was told it was a fine, very strict Quaker prep school. My father wanted me to go to Greenbrier Finishing School in Virginia, but England responded immediately and the plans were made.
The night before I left for England my father sat down with me and told me Mama was Jewish. I was stunned. The world I barely occupied was being ripped out from under me.
“That can’t be,” I explained. “She would have told me!” I was incredulous and shaken as Papa explained how Tom, Annalisa, and Larry had been proud to learn the news after graduating from college. I wondered what there was to be proud of? Mama hadn’t been proud of it. Surely she wasn’t happy about this mark upon the family or she would have told me long ago.
The following morning Mama’s eyes were swollen as she double checked my luggage for the last time. I was too embarrassed to say anything about
my conversation with Papa the night before. I felt as though we had violated some secret space within her. When the car pulled out from the driveway I waved good-bye to Mama, small and frail at the window. I thought I saw her put her palm to her lips and blow me a kiss. I fought the tears.
Papa walked me onto the plane and made sure I was comfortable and the strap was secured tightly around my lap. As he kissed me, I wondered if Mama had wanted to tell me who she was, but Papa, without asking her, had thought it best if he did. Was Mama too embarrassed or afraid I would yell at her? Was she so mad at me for being bad that she couldn’t even face me? Perhaps she felt betrayed by Papa’s actions. Perhaps she had been planning all along to tell me about our heritage. I had seen her crying earlier that morning. I wished she had come to the airport with me but maybe she feared she would break down in the car and her tears would upset me even more. Papa knelt down to hug me and reminded me that my mother’s cousin, the author Ruth Borchard, would be meeting me at Heathrow Airport in London.
“Honey, they are Orthodox Jews,” Papa was saying. “Ruth is an author and is working at becoming the first female rabbi in England. Their home in Reigate, Surrey, is large and beautiful. They have offered to be your guardians for the duration of your stay. Your mother and I have decided that you will not come home for visits, but travel through Europe on your term breaks.”
I listened to him in a fog of denial. A rabbi? Cousins in London whom Mama had never talked about? I was confused and hurting inside. Not come home for visits? Was I that awful … that miserable? What in the world was an Orthodox?
I watched as my father paused near the front of the plane and spoke with the captain. Then he turned one last time, sadly waved, and left.
It was only then that I began to cry.
My arrival in England was softened by Ruth, the kind and mysterious aunt I had never known about. I followed her into her grand house, The Elms, and admired the blond-gray wisps of hair that gracefully fell from her bun against the nape of her neck. We had tea in her library and I spied one of her books, John Stuart Mill—The Man, on one of the many built-in book shelves. I was impressed by the many pieces of art on the walls and wondered if my mother’s cultivated Jewish home in Germany had felt like this. That evening she wrote to my parents:
SEPTEMBER 1969
Dear Lisa and Larry-
What a delightful child! She has a quiet sort of strength, beyond her years—and such warmth and sensitivity. At table, she was telling about your work, Larry: “He’s really a genius”—and I said how much I had been struck by her intuitive sparkle—and little Debbie suddenly, with her eyes moistening, said: “Now you’ve made me homesick.” But going to sleep she was not.
More practical: She will join the transport of children to school Monday. I do wonder how her curriculum will shape. Ackworth is a very fine school, with a very old tradition! What a link there is suddenly between us! Ever yours, Ruth B.
This letter must have opened worries and old wounds for Mama. What would she tell Ruth about the fact that I had never heard about Ruth, her family and her life?
Within hours of leaving London, I arrived in Yorkshire and was transported to the school. I immediately sensed that it would be a harsh environment for me. On the day of my arrival I wrote this letter home:
SEPTEMBER 9, 1969
I got here yesterday. I live in Ackworth House in an attic room with four other girls. The rooms are terribly ancient. I will soon need an eiderdown comforter for the bed because the windows are kept open all night. The school is huge and will take me months to find my way around. There are a thousand rooms and halls leading to dead-end walls. Ackworth used to be an orphanage in the 1700s and resembles a place of imprisonment! I can’t think of much else to write except that I do miss you a lot!
Love Always and Sincerely, Debbie
I did not fare as well as my parents and I had hoped. As my letter suggested there were troubles brewing. Although I tried hard to be the person my parents wanted me to be, I felt like a lost orphan locked away in a world that presented only dead ends, where I would find a way to fall through the cracks.
Unfortunately, the school did not know my troubled past and never thought to assign me a mentor to guide me through this closed society, a community inhabited by kids who had been boarders since they were eleven years old. I found it hard to break through the tight bonds and cliques and find a comfortable niche.
To make matters worse, my first experience as a Jew came the second day of school, in the dining room. One of the girls joked with another boarder that she was a “Jew” for not sharing her dessert. Everyone snickered when someone else whispered, “Kike!” Like my mother, I was an alien in an enemy country and I, too, made a pact with myself that no one would know my horrible secret.
My course load was drowning me: French, Spanish, English Language, English Literature, History, Geography, Science, Homemaking, Art, Arts and Music History, and Religious Instruction. It was far too heavy after having cut school for two years.
During my second month I met Mark Blakey, a boarder since childhood and the designated Head Boy. The students called him Brutus because he was six feet tall, an athlete, and kindhearted. He was gentle, firm, well behaved, and the school pet. I felt secure in his presence. Instructive, almost fatherly toward me, he tried to protect and guide me through the cloistered boarding school society and I began to idolize him. He, in turn, seemed fascinated by my wild spirit and willingness to buck the system. I struck a chord in his quiet demeanor and turned what must have been a rather boring boarding school existence into a daily soap opera.
But Mark’s goodness couldn’t keep me from gravitating toward those with whom I felt more comfortable and had a greater allegiance: the outsiders. It was very reassuring that there were kids like me, and without their enduring kindness my experience would have been vastly different. I began to smoke, and soon, so did Mark. Within six months, although I was going steady with Mark, the school’s most popular bloke, I was having difficulty with my studies and was prone to argue with dictatorial instructors. I started drinking cough medicine to make myself hallucinate. Mark’s parents must have heard stories about me from the staff and were worried that he had chosen such an oddity for a girlfriend. They were bothered by me. I was not blue-eyed, fair-haired, light-skinned, or Anglo-Saxon, but a shade darker than they would have liked. Perhaps I was Italian, Jewish, or East Indian? When Mark’s mother came to fetch us, for the Christmas term-break, she took us to a lovely restaurant before our long ride north. While we reviewed the menu, I overheard a couple speaking at the table next to us. “She’s probably Jewish,” the woman declared, “and hopefully not an American Jew.”
I looked up in shock, wondering who they were talking about, praying it wasn’t me. Mark and his mother exchanged quick glances, then continued studying the menu. But I was suddenly deeply hurt, ashamed, and embarrassed.
In that moment I wished I had gone home to Reigate with Ruth, even though they didn’t celebrate Christmas. Feeling a sudden connection with my Jewish heritage, I wanted to be there when they didn’t turn on the lights from Friday evening through Saturday, recited hymn-like prayers over the braided bread they called challah, then sprinkled it with sea salt. I wanted to be home … with my own people.
Christmas at the Blakeys’ farm was educational. Everyone rose before 6 A.M. Mark, as the eldest son, was expected to work the land with his father. On the occasions when he was not too busy, Mark taught me how to “lamb,” a term for assisting sheep to birth their young, drive the tractor, to ride sidesaddle, English style, and he took me on a foxhunt. Mark’s mother, Marion Blakey, tried to like me, took me sightseeing, and was very kind; but her instinct was correct: I was a bad influence on her son. Although he did well on all his exams, Marion believed her son was far too taken with the troubled waif from America. But Mark vigorously defended me and I was profoundly grateful for his devotion. I had been missing someone, anyone, who thought I was special.
… I don’t seem to be able to do anything right. I wonder what’s wrong with me. I hate most of the authorities in this school. I’m tired and want to come home for a long rest.
My poor relations with my teachers finally came to a head when my English Literature schoolmaster accused me of “bastardizing” Shakespeare with my accent, then expelled me from his class for chewing gum. Later that evening I punched my fist through a window. I hadn’t intended to sever three tendons, cut an artery, and get transported by blaring ambulance to the hospital. During my two-week hospital stay, with my reattached tendons healing in a plaster cast, a minister, a priest, and a rabbi were invited to counsel me. I refused to speak to anyone but Mark.
Soon after, I wrote in my journal what seems now to be a particularly telling passage:
Once and for all I push away the cloud from my eyes.
I can see misery and pain all about me.
Suddenly I am where I began,
Still too weak to help the underprivileged of our world.
My responsibility and what am I doing? Naught!
In the summer of 1970 my parents agreed to let me come home for the six-week term break. Just before my return I received a letter from my brother Larry. He wrote of his church, the Peoples Temple, and about a man who lived Jesus’ teachings and knew all about me and my troubles. He invited me to come visit and see for myself. I wondered if maybe Larry was on drugs. How could anyone know my difficulties?
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